Art Print Price Guide

Serious art-print collectors tend to have serious collections. Though it may break their hearts, there may come a day when selling pieces or entire chunks of a collection becomes necessary. To make sure you are getting the best value and are seeing a return on your investment, use a price guide before setting up any kind of sale or auction. This is a book with listings of the approximate values of pieces of art and is generally accepted as fact when it comes to selling and buying. The following is a list of examples of art-print price guides.

ARTBrokerage is one of the leading selling services for art prints as well as original art, sculptures, and jewelry on the Internet (see Resources below). It is important to remember that art is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Just because a book or a website tells you it should be valued at $1,000 doesn't mean that is what you will actually get for it. While not officially considered a "price guide," ARTBrokerage does have listings for more than 15,000 different artists and is a good place to start when searching for other auctions of your art prints to see what they have been selling for.

Lawrence's Dealer Print Prices CD-ROM has complete listings of retail prices for almost 300,000 art prints by close to 15,000 different artists. The listings of the CD-ROM are updated every year, with an average of 30,000 listings added with each new edition. Prices are generally taken from resources dating from 1970 to the present day. The disk is produced by Gordon's Art Reference.

Also published by Gordon's Art Reference is "Gordon's Print Price Annual," which has existed for more than 20 years. The book contains a listing of modern and contemporary prints, as well as Japanese prints and vintage posters. It is considered by experts to be the best print price guide available. Each edition has more than 37,000 listings. The book can be purchased online (see Resources below).